Friday, October 09, 2009

We need to update our privacy rules for the digital age so that the "cyber
warriors" know where the boundaries are, and we also need to ensure that the boundaries are respected:

Who's in Big
Brother's Database?, by James Bamford, NYRB: On a remote edge of Utah's dry
and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted
construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may
become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place
where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time
monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word
is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will
be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy
as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's
being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily
responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various
forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and
data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital
"pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade,
Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive,
this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.
...

Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are
then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex
algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a
terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit
has a history and every keystroke tells a story. ...[...continue
reading...]...

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The "Big Brother Database"

We need to update our privacy rules for the digital age so that the "cyber
warriors" know where the boundaries are, and we also need to ensure that the boundaries are respected:

Who's in Big
Brother's Database?, by James Bamford, NYRB: On a remote edge of Utah's dry
and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted
construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may
become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place
where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time
monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word
is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will
be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy
as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's
being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily
responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various
forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and
data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital
"pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade,
Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive,
this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.
...

Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are
then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex
algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a
terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit
has a history and every keystroke tells a story. ...[...continue
reading...]...